Recent Work on Moore’s Proof

International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 2 (2):115-144 (2012)
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Abstract

RRecently, much work has been done on G.E. Moore’s proof of an external world with the aim of diagnosing just where the Proof ‘goes wrong’. In the mainstream literature, the most widely discussed debate on this score stands between those who defend competing accounts of perceptual warrant known as dogmatism and conservativism. Each account implies a different verdict on Moore’s Proof, though both share a commitment to supposing that an examination of premise-conclusion dependence relations will sufficiently reveal what’s wrong with the Proof. Parallel to this debate on Moore stands perhaps an equally interesting debate within which the Proof is critiqued as it stands in the context of the skeptical debate. On this score, Michael Fara and Ernest Sosa have weighed in with a markedly different take on Moore’s anti-skeptical ambitions and on the nature of skeptical challenges more generally. The aim of this paper will be to critically evaluate these two very distinct strands of recent work on Moore’s Proof. Part I of the paper will focus on the mainstream debate, and in Part II of the paper, I’ll focus on the parallel debate about skepticism. My critical discussion will be aimed throughout at showing how the various proposals I’ve taken as representative of these two parallel debates surrounding Moore’s Proof ultimately fall short—each for different reasons—of what a satisfactory diagnosis of the Proof would require.

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J. Adam Carter
University of Glasgow

Citations of this work

Recent Work on Skepticism in Epistemology.Chris Ranalli - 2023 - American Philosophical Quarterly 60 (3):257-273.
Cognitive Goods, Open Futures and the Epistemology of Education.J. Adam Carter - 2020 - Journal of Philosophy of Education 54 (2):449-466.

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References found in this work

The skeptic and the dogmatist.James Pryor - 2000 - Noûs 34 (4):517–549.
Warrant for nothing (and foundations for free)?Crispin Wright - 2004 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 78 (1):167–212.
What's wrong with Moore's argument?James Pryor - 2004 - Philosophical Issues 14 (1):349–378.
Basic knowledge and the problem of easy knowledge.Stewart Cohen - 2002 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (2):309-329.
Proof of an external world.George Edward Moore - 1939 - Proceedings of the British Academy 25 (5):273--300.

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